It will not have gone unnoticed that men are more violent than women. Men perpetrate about 90 percent of the world's homicides and start all of the wars. But why? A recent article in a prominent science journal contends that evolution has shaped men to be warriors. More specifically, the authors claim that men are biologically programmed to form coalitions that aggress against neighbors, and they do so in order to get women, either through force or by procuring resources that would make them more desirable. The male warrior hypothesis is alluring because it makes sense of male violence, but it is based on a dubious interpretation of the science. In my new book, I point out that such evolutionary explanations of behavior are often worse than competing historical explanations. The same is true in this case. There are simpler historical explanations of male violence, and understanding these is important for coping with the problem.

A historical explanation of male violence does not eschew biological factors, but it minimizes them and assumes that men and woman are psychologically similar. Consider the biological fact that men have more upper-body strength than women, and assume that both men and women want to obtain as many desirable resources as they can. In hunter-gatherer societies, this strength differential doesn't allow men to fully dominate women, because they depend on the food that women gather. But things change with the advent of intensive agriculture and herding. Strength gives men an advantage over women once heavy ploughs and large animals become central aspects of food production. With this, men become the sole providers, and women start to depend on men economically. The economic dependency allows men to mistreat women, to philander, and to take over labor markets and political institutions. Once men have absolute power, they are reluctant to give it up. It took two world wars and a post-industrial economy for women to obtain basic opportunities and rights.

This historical story can help to explain why men are more violent than women. The men who hold power will fight to keep it, and men who find themselves without economic resources feel entitled to acquire things by force if they see no other way. With these assumptions, we can dispense with the male warrior hypothesis, which is advanced by Melissa McDonald, Carlos Navarrete, and Mark Van Vugt, in the latest issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. These three psychologists imply that male violence is natural and inevitable, but all the evidence they offer can be explained by the simpler assumption that farming technologies allowed men co-opt power over the course of human history.

The authors claim that men are more xenophobic than women, because they are wired to wage war. But this is also predicted on the historical account, because men control governments and handle foreign relations. It follows too that men start all wars.

The authors contend that, compared to women, men prefer social dominance hierarchies, which testifies to their innately competitive nature. But this is easily explained on the social story: in male dominant societies, men gain from dominance hierarchies, and women lose.

The authors note that men are more prone to cooperate when under threat than otherwise, which may suggest an instinct to form armies. But a simpler explanation is that, having obtained power, men are reluctant to cooperate except under pressure.

The authors cite a disturbing study in which men endorse war after being primed with a picture of an attractive woman, which suggests that male violence has a sexual motive. But the link between sex and violence may derive from the fact that sex is often coercive in male dominant societies.

The authors link the male warrior hypothesis to racism: white men, they say, show greater fear responses to pictures of black men, than do white women. But this is difficult to explain on any evolutionary hypothesis, since there would have been little ethnic diversity in our ancestral past. Racism is more readily linked to the social history of slavery, an industry run by men.

The authors also remark that women become more racist at times of peak fertility, suggesting fear of impregnation by foreign invaders. A different explanation is that menstrual peaks also bring out strong emotions, which lets latent racism come to the fore.

The male warrior hypothesis makes many predictions that don't pan out. There is no evidence that men prefer foreign women--the Western ideal is Barbie--and women often like effeminate men: David Bowie would not be sexier with an enormous beard. On the male warrior hypothesis, women should fear foreigners as much as men do, because foreign men are hardwired to attack them, but women are actually more sympathetic to foreigners. This may stem from their firsthand knowledge of discrimination. Women are also more cooperative than men, which makes little sense if men are innate coalition builders.

There are dubious presuppositions as well. The warrior hypothesis assumes there was constant warfare in our evolutionary past, but some anthropologists argue that ancestral populations were too sparse for frequent contact. It also presupposes that warfare increases male fertility, when it may actually reduce fertility for all. Fertility is probably maximized when men are non-violent and share in childcare, but in many societies men beat their wives, neglect their children, and practice sex-selective infanticide against girls. The authors perpetuate the myth that evolution prefers men to be polygamous and females to be monogamous, but we see every variation in other species. In chimpanzees, both sexes seek multiple partners.

Social history explains such facts by proposing that men have taken power by their greater strength, leading to violent competition and the abuse of women. This approach correctly predicts cross-cultural variation in gender differences. As women gain economic power, they cease being treated as male property, age differences between romantic partners shrink, and violence against women diminishes. On the flipside, women who gain power, like Margaret Thatcher and Condaleeza Rice, are often hawkish, suggesting that power, not gender, determines belligerence. Women in the judiciary dole out harsher penalties than men. And woman are committing more acts of domestic violence that previously recorded.

To reduce male violence, it is not sufficient to reform men, as the defenders of the male warrior hypothesis recommend. Nor will it suffice to empower women. This will reduce domestic violence, but not war, because women can be as aggressive as men. Warfare did not decline precipitously with women's suffrage, and during recent conflicts with Russia, 43 percent of Chechen suicide bombers have been women. Crucially, we must reduce the incentives for violence. In a recent book, Steven Pinker documents a radical reduction in violence with the rise of democracy and global trade, a comforting confirmation that social factors matter (for two reviews see here and here). I think Pinker's optimism may be overstated: global trade has done less to remedy the poverty that devastates lives of people outside the economic partnerships between wealthy nations; healthy trading relationships can lead one nation to overlook the human rights abuses in another; and there have also been dozens of attempts at genocide since the Second World War. In fact, Pinker too eagerly accepts the myth of the ignoble savage: the idea that humans are violent by nature. But his book does contain a crucial insight. He shows that patterns of violence can be dramatically altered by historical forces. Attitues towards slavery, torture, and honor killing change over time, and this should make us realize that the biological contributions to violence may be greatly outweighed by the sociological.

Violence is a complex problem, which no simple biological approach can diagnose or remedy. Factors such as political instability, population density, and income inequality are associated with massive differences in violence across cultures, and these differences are observed while gender ratios remain constant. Of course, men still hold most of the power in the world, and it is no surprise, then, that they perpetrate most of the violence. But that too is a historical fact, not a biological given. If we focus on biology instead of economic and historical variables, we will miss out on opportunities for progress.

If being raised by single mothers were the reason, then why are most, murderers serial killers male? There are lots of women who were raised by single mothers and they dont grow up to be a fucked up murderer.

Your entire argument amounts to shit on a sidewalk when you realize the fact that there are little to no serial killings happening in this modern era. They occur once every blue moon vs. the 100's of millions of men a day that DON'T commit serial killings, and your dumb fucking ass is acting like this shit happens 7 days a week in every state.

Like everything else, a multitude of factors play into men becoming mass murderers. It doesn't have to do with them being MEN you stupid piece of garbage.

Some shit that plays into it: More pressure on men to provide and live up to expectations vs. leniency, societal and systemic comfort for women, a plethora of safety nets and shelters for women. Systemic disadvantage for men in divorce court that cause them to go crazy or commit suicide. Dating power in the hands of women, thus women can get laid any time they want, but do not since they have privilege to be more selective with who they choose. Men more often than not remain single and frustrated. Men have to be a provider to have a relationship, have to have repressed emotions, never complain when suffering and has to be willing to sacrifice as disposable to be a "admirable gender role". Women just have to be pretty to find a mate, or they can have a career, or all of the above because they have a vag. Think that's clear enough, you cunt.

Yeah, you are NOT expressing anger, an extreme violent mindset and lack of emotional control with your comments, Anonymous. Nope, not at all.
That is the problem with male violence. It starts with the language.

By the way: no one said serial killings happen 7 days a week. Just the truth: that most serial killers are men. Most killers are men, period.

And for the rest… that has nothing to do with what is being said.
Not to mention that you are saying nonsense as well, like "dating power in the hands of women", as if women could force men to date them and men could not say no, saying that men "more often than not" (!) remain single, even though most men get to find a relationship at least once in their lifetime, just like women, or that "men have to provide to have a relationship" even though most women not only work but also don't depend financially anymore, or that "being pretty" to a woman is just an eeeasy thing to accomplish, and that "women can have a career" because they have vaginas (what).
For real, dude. Get a clue, get some sense, go seek therapy. Your anger isn't pretty.
Maybe you should go see that emotional/intellectual dyslexia as well.

I find it astounding such simplistic articles are published in a magazine like Psychology Today. A partial opinion that does not even acknowledge the reality that male aggression is the rule in every other species on earth. Do you think humans are, but for for some "historical" reason the exception?

Evolution is a part of history, you moron. Are you a geneticist? Do you actually have any background to be talking on this subject or are you just verbally spewing your biased diarrhea on men's supposed innate violent nature?

The KKK had the same mindset, they developed this thing called race realism where instead of calling them "dumb, violent niggers", they attempt attributing the violence a small number commit to the entire gender's innate being.

Maybe when you can get a half-assed understanding of the basic idea of what aggression is without attributing negative value to it by default, once you can get a clear grasp of why it is useful in the animal kingdom, come back and try talking with adults.

You obviously haven't had a proper fuck if you have to call it "male aggression", as if "female aggression" never existed. Stupid bitch.

I never said female aggression didn't exist. But you also prove my point. Nasty asshole you are so obviously male.
And in some instances, as you so aptly demonstrate evolution has been retrograde. Most animals are kinder than you.

Typical man-hating Feminist trash. Are you sure it's because I'm male that aggression is expected? Or is it cause I'm not constrained by the female gender role which entails being obsessed with your reputation, not offending people, generally being a chickenshit??

I've met plenty of women who are just as angry as I am at people who are pig shit ignorant like yourself.

"Or is it cause I'm not constrained by the female gender role which entails being obsessed with your reputation, not offending people, generally being a chickenshit??"

Oh noez, a dude who is obssessed with hating feminism/feminists! You guys are hilarious.

It's actually called being a civilized, educated, "in control of your emotions" person. You could try it, many men from developed Countries act like grown up adults just like that - being a decent human being and not a degenerate is part of their "male gender role".
And dude, anger is not the issue. It's how you express it and how you let it take control of yourself. How you let it be your ruler and actully use it to try to "destroy" other people, even though it mostly only destroys your own image.

And talking about image and reputation... males are, at elast, as much as into it than females. Probably more, as there is too much "no homo", "no I'm not feminine at alll" and other types of nonsense like that among your culture.

"You obviously haven't had a proper fuck if you have to call it "male aggression", as if "female aggression" never existed. Stupid bitch."

Dude. Look at what you're doing.
You have a twisted mindset. You are uneducated, angry, not civilized and still want to tell other people to "come to talk with adults", as if you were acting like one. It's THAT type of degeneracy that we should not be tolerating anymore from you, macho male individuals, you just help to keep society in chaos, you guys are destroyers.
You just get aggressive and use offensive words (and sexist/misogynist language) just because you sense someone else with a different opinion (or not) as an "enemy". That is violence turned into words, that is words/internet war. You have no morals to speak about someone else's behavior or opinions, as yours is already all too poor.
And oh, of course you had to bring sex (no, "fuck") to the conversation! And of course you had to bring "female aggression" and believe in your own mind that people don't know that also exists... and feel oh so hurt that people aren't talking about that even though the FOCUS isn't on female aggression.

You are a straight American male, right? Most of the hysterical males with absolute no emotional control or decency we encounter on the internet being sexists/misogynists, homophobic and/or racists, using prejudiced slurs, many many "bad words", displaying intellectual dyslexia (one says "most violence is committed by men" and you reply "no, NOT ALL MEN ARE VIOLENT" as if that's what was said), being just plain rude, uneducated and uncivilized… and that still can speak English with no "weirdness"… are straight American dudes.
Most of the ones who do the same but with "weird English" are Indians. But at least they come from a third world country.

Not " every other" species, actually. But most of them, yes. The type of violence/agression varies extremely from specie to specie, though.

Most female violence/aggression is because they feel threatened and they have to protect their young.
Many of the male violence/aggression goes to other members of their own group just fo the sake of trying to be "dominant", though.

Goddamn, you're fuckin' stupid. "Men are psychopaths if they call *women* cunts and bitches", as if your special snowflake ass doesn't deserve to be called a cunt and a bitch. Then in the very same fucking paragraph you call a man a prick. Your IQ is too low.

"Stupid ass sexually repressed man-hating dumb fucking cunts. Violent men consist of a small minority of men, stop capitalizing MEN like you have some fucking point you dunce bitch."

Dude, hahahaha!
"Sexually repressed", as if it was offensive or something lol. "Man-hating" just for saying the obvious: men are usually more violent than women. And oh, that means "all men" in your dyslexic mind. That is hilarious!
Dude, when we talk about how you guys can only use prejudiced slurs and "bad words" and things like that, it's NOT because it necessarily "hurts" us, it's just because it's pathetic, doesn't improve your argument (in fact, it only proves you deserve being ignored by everyone). Like, it just means nothing, it's empty, it's juvenile. So don't keep believing that you acting like a degenerate fool will hurt or make anyone scared, it won't. So there's no reason to keep being silly.
We all could be calling you an eunuch who will die with a swollen prostate, which won't change much as you are impotent anyways, and that women won't even be able to fake orgasms with you as even faking would not be possible if you are in front of such ugly, fat, flabby and hairy worthless male with such an ugly, weirdly colored penis, but hey, that is just too childish. Decent people still still have higher standards and allow themselves to act like an angry male troglodyte like that.

Really, that was a devastating bloggeriffic smack-down of almost epic awesomeness. You must be doin' the touchdown endzone dance ever since posting it.

"Prehistoric women, say [anthropologists] Moir and Jessel, with shorter lifespans and more pregnancies than modern women, could expect 10 menstruations in her life. Modern women can expect 400! We have to put up with forty times more shit from our women than biology ever intended, and they expect us to believe that we are the problem."
- Rich Zubaty

That quote doesn't make sense... so menstruation is "the problem". I bet he meant "we" as "we, men". But menstruation is only a problem for females.
PMS varies from women to women, some women just don't have it and no, it's not the cause for men - or women - going out and being violent to people, both women and other men.
In fact, women are the ones who suffer from PMS and STILL don't commit as much crimes.

Research suggests that women sometimes like masculine faces and sometimes more feminine faces. For example, in this study linked here, when hair is not shown, over 50% of women show a preference for a more feminine male face: www.facelab.org/include/download?id=305

"On the flipside, women who gain power, like Margaret Thatcher and Condalisa Rice, are often hawkish, suggesting that power, not gender, determines belligerence"
what happened to correlation does not mean causation?

Fair point. In isolation a few powerful hawkish women might indicate that hawkish women seek power, but there is actually a huge literature suggesting that power corrupts women too. In Stanley Milgram's classic obedience, women were at least as likely as men to administer what they thought were harmful electric shock, and Zimbardo's classic prison experiment, in which social roles cause cruel behavior, has been replicated with women as well. Here is Zimbardo summarizing one result:

"To investigate this I created an experiment. We took women students at New York University and made them anonymous. We put them in hoods, put them in the dark, took away their names, gave them numbers, and put them in small groups. And sure enough, within half an hour those sweet women were giving painful electric shocks to other women within an experimental setting"

Women my dear lad are just as violent as men but perpetuate their violence in different ways. Emotional, psychological, more than physical. I grow tired of these platitudes where men as a gender are portrayed as violent physical aggressors and the women are the hapless victims. New research is showing that this is not the case so much anymore.

"If that's true, it's because they are raised by violent women. Read the literature."

So you are saying that there are much less (or, juding by your phrase, not at all) men raising their kids. You also believe that culture and society doesn't influence people at all.
You are blaming people's violence on their parents. That's ridiculous. Yes, my parents could have been violent or racist or whatever, and they do have the responsability for being so. But me, as an individual and as an adult, now have 100% the responsibility of my actions, my thoughts, et cetera. Blame only the individual for their own actions.

Also, you believe that females are psychologically stronger, because females are also raised by "violent women" (and men) but don't turn out to be nearly as close as 50% of the murderers, serial killers, rapists, criminals in general, gang members, et cetera. Well, that might be true in some ways... but I still believe culture play a bif role. Masculinity supports violence in many ways.

Isn't the question not whether or not women can be violent, but what is the variance between genders? For instance, whether women are more violent than men in response to certain stimuli, and vice versa. Or, more pointedly, the respective probabilities that men will be violent and women will be violent.

As an recipient of significant bullying both physical and psychologial while attending an all girls' school and seeing it repeated by professional women in positions of authority later in life I can only say that I'm not at all surprised at the results of the experient.

Regretfully, women can be just a violent as men, given the means and the opportunity and I never believed feminists who say that the world would be a better place if women were in charge.

Women CAN be just as violent, it's just that less women than men choose to be violent. Not in any Country women commit as many crimes overall, not just yet. Maybe one day they will, maybe not.
Women still choose to be less corrupted as well. Overall, less female politicians choose to be criminals than male politicians.

And that is basically what people mean by saying "men are more violent", in general. They mean that men as a group commit more violence.
Now, one can try to understand why it's like that, and some believe that is so because males are usually more violent/use violence more often than females in most species (and that is true).

When the Himalayan peasant
Meets the he-bear in his pride,
He shouts to scare the monster,
Who will often turn aside.
But the she-bear thus accosted
Rends the peasant tooth and nail.
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.

When Nag the basking cobra
Hears the careless foot of man,
He will sometimes wriggle sideways
And avoid it if he can.
But his mate makes no such motion
Where she camps beside the trail.
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.

When the early Jesuit fathers preached
To Hurons and Choctaws,
They prayed to be delivered
From the vengeance of the squaws.
'Twas the women, not the warriors,
Turned those stark enthusiasts pale.
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.

You posit that men are violent, not innately, but because during the Agricultural Revolution men, being physically stronger than women, began taking over the production of food sources (because it required great amounts of strength) which provided the daily calories consumed by the group, and thusly, the feminine sex became reliant on the masculine sex. Now with power over their family, group, and tribe, men became fearful of the power of other tribes, namely the fear the other tribe would cause the men of this tribe to lose their power.

This is an elegant answer, and very well maybe true, but let’s take a step back. You state that men are biologically stronger then women which in turn created this whole situation. Why are men stronger? Why did men of the human species become strongest before the advent of Agriculture, rampant warfare, and power-mongering? Are we stronger because our primate ancestor’s males were stronger? What about their ancestors? And so on?

Strength in males is for one thing, in my mind anyway, violence against Earth; which is to say the animal struggle to survive buried deep within us. Physical strength helped primates and humans defeat animal threats to our survival and gave us power to manipulate the world we live in. In my mind this is progenitor of violence, and as the human-global consciousness increases so the violence against the globe and those living in it. Agriculture, to me, only exacerbated an existing, innate, human condition to an excessive level; literally steroids.

To summarize, violence is innate and necessary to manipulate the earth to ensure -humanity proliferate, as with other animal species. The power gained by males from monopolizing agriculture exacerbated that violence to the level you’ve discussed in your article but did not create it. It was always there.

Of course, great article and I hope to hear a response from you on my post, and as Martin Bachelor so eloquently put it, hope you put the ‘bloggeriffic smack-down’ on me.